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Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

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Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#121

Post by wheybags »

doikor wrote: post #10

> Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine. If your development environment/tooling/workflow does not gain any real advantage from more CPU cores. Also your data must fit in the 16GB of RAM as offloading any workload to disk will kill the performance and you cannot add more. The M1 has excellent single core performance so any task that is mainly single threaded wi…

Yes, I'd really like to see a large c++ project compile added to that list of benchmarks.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#122

Post by Technically »

fredsted wrote: post #107
soheil wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a quick note, the MacBook Air is by no means "ultralight" even by Apple standards, 2017 MacBook for example was more than twice lighter. Thinkpad laptops are also measurably lighter than any current generation MacBook.

Yes, Apple's current lineup is a little confusing. The 13" Pro and 13" Air are so similar, and almost the same weight. I still use a 12" MacBook, and it's just amazingly small and light. If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome. A dream machine for me.

I don't get why they didn't keep the macbook branding. It's really weird that my 2016 macbook is so noticeably lighter than the current air.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#123

Post by ogre_codes »

x87678r wrote: post #60

Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.

You can look at Apple's mobile CPU performance gains over the past 10 years for an idea of what the current trajectory is.

There is likely to be a couple more big performance jumps similar to this when Apple releases versions of this with more cores.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#124

Post by JohnTHaller »

bb123 wrote: post #11

The fact that we are even able to realistically compare a CPU in an ultralight laptop with no fan to an i9 is absolutely amazing. To me that would be an upgrade even if performance is a complete wash.

I think they're more light than ultralight. Otherwise the performance stands.

LG Gram 2020: 2.07 lbs

MacBook 2017: 2.03 lbs

MacBook Air 2020: 2.8 lbs

MacBook Pro 2020: 3.0 lbs

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#125

Post by grogenaut »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #79

I recently ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon at a steep discount ($830 for Gen 8 w/ 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD). I felt great about it when I ordered it, but now I'm agonizing over whether to cancel and get an M1 MacBook Air instead. I'll probably be using the laptop for 4-5 years, and I'm concerned that anything with a current-gen Intel chip is going to feel like "legacy tech" for most of that time. Amazing how the M1 has ch…

I would say your opportunity cost is higher w the Mac but really I would just want 2 laptops in 3 years

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#126

Post by floatboth »

jchw wrote: post #6
hankmander wrote: post #2

Shouldn't Ryzen 4000 be a better comparison?

Ryzen 4000 is a mobile processor. Ryzen 5000 would likely fare better, but it is hard to acquire right now. Even then, it will be a process node behind the M1 (TSMC 7nm vs 5nm) so I suspect the battle for the fastest core will be heating up into next year. edit: ah, I suppose the M1 is also a mobile processor. Having one myself (in the form of a Mac Mini,) it’s easy to forget...

Not necessarily mobile, 4750G is an 8-core desktop APU (especially famous in the overclocking crowd for having the best DDR4 memory controller ever, thanks to being a monolithic TSMC 7nm die).

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#127

Post by skrtskrt »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #79

I recently ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon at a steep discount ($830 for Gen 8 w/ 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD). I felt great about it when I ordered it, but now I'm agonizing over whether to cancel and get an M1 MacBook Air instead. I'll probably be using the laptop for 4-5 years, and I'm concerned that anything with a current-gen Intel chip is going to feel like "legacy tech" for most of that time. Amazing how the M1 has ch…

Wow how did you get it that cheap?

At that price I wouldn’t worry about it becoming obsolete I would just wait 2-3 years for either another round of Mac updates or a Thinkpad with more modern chip

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#128

Post by kllrnohj »

x87678r wrote: post #60

Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.

The M1 already has the widest CPU design of anything out there. It's possible that Apple will still be able to scale up even wider, but that wouldn't be a necessarily "safe" bet. There's nothing obviously on the table for a big uptick in IPC. Apples got a great trajectory and great engineers, of course, but there's nothing here where you can point to an existing thing and be like "now as soon as they add that, too, wow!"

It's "only" running at a peak of around 3.2ghz, though, so there's a lot of clear theoretical headroom on that front. But whether or not things like their cache or other subsystems can handle higher frequencies is unknown. But clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo would be a potentially large gain - at the cost of also a huge uptick in power consumption, though, so Apple may just decline to go that route entirely, at least on their mobile CPUs.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#129

Post by vlovich123 »

api wrote: post #16
tambourine_man wrote: post #13

Can't wait to see the Mac Pro. The argument is over for best laptop processor. I want to see if Apple is as eager to beat the competition in the Workstation/HPC space as they were in the mobile/laptop. I think they are, Srouji looks like he's got a knife in his teeth and can't wait to claim fastest personal computer ever period. But we'll have to see, it's a tiny, tiny market to justify the effort.

How much effort is it really? Make a version of this with more cores and cache and maybe all high-performance cores instead of heterogenous. It's just a remix of the same already designed components. The only really tough thing would be supporting things desktop users want like external video cards, but people may be willing to forego that if the CPU smokes everything else and if the built-in GPU is at least fast eno…

It’s a focus and vertical integration thing. Is the market big enough to justify the increased costs of SW and HW development (not just direct incremental cost but also indirect costs like more support staff, office space, etc). Then are the developments you make to support that market transferable in some way. Are there techniques you prototype in the more expensive/less power-constrained space that help your other markets in the long term?

Im sure Apple could produce something in the HPC space. The question is whether it makes financial and/or strategic sense to compete there.

Re: Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

#130

Post by ogre_codes »

kllrnohj wrote: post #104
ogre_codes wrote: post #73

This kind of changes the narrative about the Intel/ AMD competition of late. For the past few years people have been suggesting AMD has been hitting it out of the park in terms of performance. This suggests that's not necessarily the case. AMD didn't have to hit it out of the park to humiliate Intel, they just needed to be competent. A professional ball club doesn't need a team of All Stars to embarrass a farm team.

Well note that this seems to be nearly all single-core (or low-core) benchmarks, whereas AMD's Ryzen performance recommendation has always been around its multithreaded performance, with its single-core performance called out specifically as being a compromise (until the 5000 series, anyway, which wasn't used here). Something like an ObjC or C++ compilation test would be very interesting here.

Yep.

It's a bit of tit for tat though. It's AMD's desktop CPUs versus Apple's new mobile CPU. But the benchmarks in question don't leverage all of AMDs cores.

Over the next couple years things should have more clarity when AMD moves to TSMC's 5nm CPUs and Apple releases their higher core CPUs.

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